95-cnet Books Mark Penguin's 60th Year

People who frequent bookstores may have noticed the collection of 95-cent books called Penguin 60s published last year to help celebrate the British publisher's 60th year of publishing.

The books have been marketed as portable, inexpensive ways for readers to access some of the resources of the large, respected Penguin library.

The Penguin 60s series refers both to the number of books in the list, as well as their price in the United Kingdom, 60 pence, or, as the British commonly say, 60p (about 95 cents).

Less widely known is that Penguin published two different lists of 60s, one in the United States and a second for sale in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe.

The lists vary greatly, and only 10 titles show up on both lists, according to Maureen Donnelly, a Penguin spokeswoman.

Several prominent American authors, such as James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Dick Francis and John Updike, appear on the British list, but not on the American list.

Penguin plans to release a second set of 60 books this spring, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Penguin Classics series.

Titles in the classics list include Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," James Boswell's "Meeting Mr. Johnson," Sir Thomas Malory's "The Death of King Arthur" and several anonymous works.

Other companies are following suit. Random House is publishing Modern Library Minis. The books, slightly larger than the 60s and more expensive, with a retail price of $1.99, arrived in stores last week.

A Random House spokesman said that instead of making low price and multiple titles a priority, Random House was trying for a "higher quality" book, using heavier paper and a different type.

Random House is also publishing only half as many copies of half as many titles, and doing that only a few at a time.

Among the first six books to be published are "The Diary of Adam and Eve" by Mark Twain; "Going to Bed and Other Poems" by John Donne, and "Bella-Vista" by Colette.

Donnelley said that in addition to marketing considerations, the compilers of the different lists also had to consider publishing rights. Penguin, for example, publishes Updike's books in Great Britain, but Knopf publishes his work in the United States.

There have been other differences. In the United Kingdom, the Penguin 60s dominated the British best-seller lists for most of the summer, which caused a stir among publishers, because the Penguin books were a fraction of the cost of new, hardcover books, the kind that usually dominated the lists.

There was no similar reaction to the books on the U.S. best-seller lists. Only one of the American Penguin 60s, Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching," made it on the best-seller lists in the United States, and that was for a three-week stay.

Donnelly said that the bookstores that report their weekly sales to The New York Times and other publications that monitor best-selling books didn't always report sales of the Penguins, because the sales were under $1.

Still, Donnelly said Penguin considers the books to be successful, both in the United States and elsewhere.

"We saw the series as a way of giving people access to authors whom they should read, but haven't," Donnelly said.